NFL's glorified scrimmages are a ludicrous fraud

Glenn Dickey

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, September 4, 2004

This has been the last week of the worst fraud in sports, the pro football exhibition season.

The NFL doesn't call it that, of course. For many years, they've referred to "preseason" games. Just like automobile dealers who call used cars "previously owned," NFL executives don't realize that a pig is still a pig, even if it has a coat of gold paint.

Baseball is much more honest about this process. They call their games exhibitions, play them in areas away from the cities where the franchises are located and charge much lower ticket prices. Most significantly, nobody is coerced into buying these tickets.

In earlier times, before the NFL became so successful, teams often played exhibition games out of town, too, in cities which did not have regular season games.

But as success came, teams started playing these exhibitions in their own stadiums and requiring season ticket-holders to also buy tickets for the exhibition games, at the same price. As a method of alienating their fans, that could hardly be beat. Many season ticket-holders give away their exhibition game tickets. Often, they can't even give them away. It's not uncommon to go to a 49er exhibition and see 20,000 empty seats, though they're sold out on a season basis.

These games have value to the coaches, who use them as laboratories for trying out new plays and offensive and defensive schemes, trying players at different positions, so they'll be prepared if injuries force a change in the regular season, looking at players in different game situations.

But when they try to pretend that the results really matter, it's a travesty. In the final two minutes of the Raiders game with the Cardinals last Saturday, the Raiders tried to convert with a run on third down. The original call was that they had made the first down, but then the officials decided to review the play.

In a regular-season game, this would have been a tense moment because the Raiders led by only a point. Had they made the first down, they could have run out the clock, because the Cardinals had no time outs left.

But the game didn't count, so it was a ludicrous waste of time. As it happened, the replay showed the Raiders had not made it, so they had to punt. The Cardinals were not able to move into position to try a field goal, so the game ended with the Raiders winning.

Ask yourself this: Would it have made any real difference if the Cardinals had kicked a field goal and won the game? Of course not, because it doesn't count in the standings.

There are things you can learn from watching these glorified scrimmages. Attitude is important, and effort. Watching the Raiders in the exhibition season last year, it was obvious something was wrong. The Raiders played sluggishly and made foolish mistakes.

Trying to predict a team's regular-season record off its record in the exhibition season, though, is folly, because there are too many variables that don't exist in the regular season. Younger players are trying harder to impress coaches than veterans whose jobs are assured. Late in games, coaches are using players who won't be on the roster during the season. Unlike the regular season, winning is not usually their primary goal.

I learned this lesson in the first year I covered the Raiders for The Chronicle, in 1967. The Raiders played five exhibition games that year. In the third game, they lost to Kansas City, 48-0. In the fourth game, they lost to the Denver Broncos, 21-17. In the fifth game, they lost to the 49ers, 13-10.

Then, the regular season started. In their first game, the Raiders beat Denver, 51-0. They beat Kansas City twice during the season, finished 13-1 and went to the Super Bowl. The 49ers were 7-7 and home for the holidays.

At one time, there were six exhibitions and 14 regular-season games. Since then, the schedule has been changed to 16 regular-season games and four exhibitions. Coaches have told me they could get by with just two exhibitions, leaving room for 18 regular-season games, but when that's proposed, it's rejected for one reason: Television networks don't want to start the season before Labor Day.

So, we're stuck with four of these meaningless games. If NFL teams were honest with their fans, they would eliminate these games from the season-ticket package and make exhibition game tickets available to whoever wanted them.

But that would mean smaller crowds and thus, less money for everybody, so the chance of that happening is nil. Money always trumps principle.